


Love After Death: The Afterlife Hotel

by wordsbymeganmichael



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 08:45:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19460482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordsbymeganmichael/pseuds/wordsbymeganmichael
Summary: Emma Swan has spent sixty years in the afterlife believing she was never going to meet her real soulmate, after believing in the wrong name tattooed on her wrist. But when she keeps seeing the same new guest of the Afterlife Hotel around, might she be able to learn how to love again?





	Love After Death: The Afterlife Hotel

Emma Swan stands at her desk, staring down at the calendar that she’s not sure why they even bother to have in the first place. Time is meaningless here. Sure, the "sun" rises and sets on opposite sides of the building on a 24 hour cycle, but time doesn't actually pass anymore. 

Except… if there wasn’t a desk calendar, if she was only going by the date in the corner of her monitor screen (though also unnecessary), she probably never would have realized that it was once again the third day of July in the real world. She almost definitely would have allowed the day to pass by uneventfully, would have completely forgotten the same way she wishes she would have forgotten every other year. 

Sixty years. It’s been sixty years to the day since the first time she entered this very hotel. No family, even when she was alive. Abandoned as a child, never finding a family of her own beyond the sole person she believed was her family, the one that she believed was her soulmate — but, in the end, he was her demise, the name she should have avoided instead of married. 

She had a fifty-fifty chance, like everyone else in the world. It was a stupid concept, she always thought it was: her soulmate’s name on one wrist, and the name of her enemy, very likely the name of the person that would cause her death, on the other, just like everyone else in the world. But she learned the hard way that she made the wrong choice, and by putting her trust in the name on her right wrist and not her left, she suffered more than just heartbreak. By trusting Neal instead of running away the moment he introduced himself — perhaps even before that, now that she's had time to look back over the time they spent together — she was killed.

She remembers the moment her names appeared as if it wasn't almost seventy years before. That's the funny thing about being dead, she guesses (if there was anything funny about it) because the sixty years she's been dead have felt like nothing compared to the nine years between the time her names appeared on her twenty-first birthday and the moment Neal smiled above her as he slid his dagger into her heart. His handwriting on her right wrist, the curling letters of his signature, seemed much more attractive than the scribbles that she stopped trying to decipher before she turned 22. By then, she had already met Neal Cassidy, had already convinced herself that she loved him beyond the presence of his name on her wrist, and he had conned her into believing he loved her, too, up until that very last moment. 

Sixty years. Sixty years since her death. But it was dying that led her to find something really worth living for, even if she never got the chance to meet her real soulmate. And it was still just the " _ beginning _ ."

Emma still remembers that first day, greeted by a smiling Mary Margaret Nolan. Smiling, as if there was something to be happy about. Emma knew that she had died, was very aware of it, given Neal left her to die a very slow and painful death — but the last thing she expected after the “bright white light” was an elevator ride down to the lobby of a hotel, especially one with a smiling brunette behind its counter.

_ “Hello!” Her voice was chipper, almost fake, but her smile most certainly was not. “Welcome to the Afterlife Hotel!”  _

_ “Really?” Emma remembers quipping immediately, not even trying to hide the look of disgust on her face. She was already trying to do too many things to control what was showing on her face. “You couldn’t even come up with a better name?”  _

_ But Mary Margaret was resilient, moving on without so much as acknowledging Emma’s comment, and when she asked Emma what she wanted to do — if she had any family she wanted to wait for, anywhere in particular she wanted to be — all Emma felt was empty. Sure, the emptiness tried to veil itself with snide remarks and humor, as it always had, but none of it got any further than her own mind. _

_ “No.” Her voice was soft. “No, I — I have no one.”  _

It was Mary Margaret’s job to lead her through the afterlife, to help her decide where she will spend the rest of eternity. But, instead of a decision, Mary Margaret helped her find a “family” for the first time in her life (well, uh, death), people that actually cared for her. Mary Margaret and David Nolan, the first parental figures Emma has ever had, and all she had to do was die to find them. 

Thinking back on this memory, she smiles down at her desk, unconsciously drawing a light circle around the “3” with her pencil. 

And that’s why she doesn’t immediately notice when the doors to the elevator right in front of her open, revealing perhaps the most awestruck man to have come through those doors that Emma had ever seen. 

“Bloody hell!” he yells, literally falling out of the elevator and onto the floor, simultaneously pulling Emma back to reality. 

_ Well, that’s certainly interesting,  _ Emma thinks, her eyebrows flying quickly up her forehead as she watches him, dumbstruck, as he struggles to get up off the floor. In all the years she’s spent here, she’s only ever seen people walk through the elevator doors, usually slowly and questioning everything around them just as she did sixty years ago ( _ to the day _ ). 

But she’s never seen anyone fall out of it. They’ve always been on their feet after the long, slow ride down, able to pull themselves together a bit until the doors finally open and they find themselves in the lobby. 

“Pardon me, lass, where — what the hell happened to me?” His deeply-accented question pulls her out of her stupor, and she blinks a few times before completely returning to reality — and when she does, she almost finds herself in a daze again as she takes him in. He’s tall, muscular, but lean, his grey jeans tight against his legs and low on his hips with a plain white t-shirt under a black leather jacket, the v of the neck falling low enough to show what Emma assumes is just the beginning of a sea of black hair covering his chest, matching the shade that covers his head and the stubble on his cheeks. 

“You’re—” she starts, but looking down at the desk, she remembers where she is, what her job is, and pulls her best  _ customer service  _ smile to her face. “Welcome to the Afterlife Hotel!” she says, her voice much cheerier than she intended it to be, though she blames it on the confusion quickly filling the air of the lobby. 

Slowly, he takes a few steps towards her as he swivels his head from one side to the other, taking in the sights of the lobby around him: the grey stone floors, the deep red walls and high white ceilings, the crisp white and grey furniture and abstract paintings on the walls. Then he stops just a few steps away from the desk, and when he turns his eyes to her, the air in her lungs suddenly gets very heavy — because in them, she finds the brightest blue she has seen, definitely since the first time she walked across this same lobby, but she believes probably since the day she was born. 

“Come again?” he asks, one dark eyebrow raised high on his broad forehead, almost lost under the strands of dark hair that fall close to his eyes. 

“You’ve found yourself in the afterlife,” she replies, dialing down the chipperness of her voice, but not losing it entirely. “This is the Afterlife Hotel, for lost souls and those waiting for others to join them.”

“The Afterlife Hotel,” he repeats, the same skepticism in his voice that she remembers from her own that very first day, though she manages to keep the smile off her face that she feels trying to start. But when he adds, “You really couldn’t come up with a better name?”, she is useless against it anymore, and the smile comes paired with a small laugh. 

“What’s so funny about that?” he asks, moving to fill the rest of the space between himself and the desk. 

She begins to shake it off, ready to tell him that it was nothing, but something in his bright blue eyes makes her snap her mouth shut and reexamine this choice. She doesn’t realize that she has remained silent until his eyebrows slowly move up his forehead once more, wordlessly coaxing her to say anything. 

So she does. 

“It’s just… moments before you came through the elevator, I was thinking about the first day I ended up here, and I — when I heard the woman behind the counter tell me where I was, I asked her the very same thing.” 

“Is that so?” he asks, the beginnings of a smile forming on his face, and it is, without a doubt, one of the most brilliant smiles she has ever seen, even half-formed. “So, what do I do here, love? Tell me more about this hotel of yours,” he says, the smile staying as he leans forward onto the counter, resting on his elbows. She realizes that one of his hands is a prosthetic, but a very technologically-advanced, real-looking one.

“Well,” she says, playing along and leaning towards him, as well — though she will absolutely refuse to admit how much she enjoys it. “This is the first stop of the afterlife. From here, you can choose to move on to the place of your choice, depending on what you believed during your life, you can wait here for your loved ones to arrive — of course, if you have loved ones waiting already, I can find them for you — or you can just… stay here.” When he says nothing, she feels the need to fill the silence that settles between them. “Do you…” she starts, but when his eyes flash up to meet hers, her breath gets caught in her throat for a moment and she needs to start over. “Is there anyone for you to wait for?” She doesn’t mean for it to, but her voice is barely a whisper, again thinking of her first day here and the fact that she had no one, either. Is that what she recognizes in this man’s eyes: loneliness? Sadness? 

He shakes his head, failing to hide the way his thumb presses into his left wrist for a moment, and when his tongue flicks out of his mouth to wet his bottom lip, she finds herself oddly distracted by the movement, unable to tear her eyes away, especially when a shadow of a smile appears on those very same lips. “Afraid I only have one, and that asshole had the audacity to continue to live his life when I was taken prematurely.” Emma just nods, not entirely sure how to respond to that, though when he opens his mouth to speak again, all worries about that have faded away. “So, I can just… stay here, until my brother gets here?”

At this, Emma smiles, leaning against the counter once more. “Well, yeah. That’s the main purpose of this establishment, and if you give me your name, I can direct you to your room.”

“Of course, lass. Killian Jones, at your service,” he says, holding his hand out between them, but when she takes it, instead of shaking it, he lifts it to his lips and presses a soft kiss to the edge of her knuckles. 

She stills for a moment when he releases her hand before turning her attention back towards the computer as she tries her hardest to not let her response to his actions show on her face. “Emma Swan,” she breathes, typing his name into the system. Looking away from him, she misses the way his eyes widen at her revelation, his eyes falling to his still-covered right wrist resting on the counter, though he pulls himself together quickly enough to wipe the look from his face before she turns back to him.

When she sees what the screen is telling her, she is useless against the smile that spreads across her face. “Well, Mr. Jones, room 715 has been all set up for you, and you can get there with the elevator behind the desk.” 

He smiles at her and moves to leave, but before he does, his eyebrows knit together, and Emma can sense a question on the tip of his tongue.

“Can I ask you something, love?” 

“Yes, of course.” 

“Does every person that dies come through here? Because, forgive my bluntness, love, but isn’t that a hell of a lot of people?” 

She smiles at this, too, remembering that it took her close to two months in this very hotel before she even thought of the same question. But here, this gorgeous, handsome man —  _ Killian, _ she reminds herself, realizing that it somehow fits him perfectly, if names can do that to people — has thought if it within his first few minutes. “You’re right,” she says, directing her smile towards him. “If everyone came through here, that would be a hell of a lot of people. But we don’t get everyone. If people have a chosen afterlife, no one to wait for, or if the person they are waiting for has already moved to a specific afterlife, they don’t come through here. Here, we only get the lost souls.” 

“Well, darling,” he says, his voice just above a whisper, leaning across the counter until she can feel his warm breath on her cheek. “I’m glad being a lost soul has led me to you.” 

When he winks, by far the most straightforward flirting that Emma has ever experienced, she feels her breath leave her lungs, her heart beating heavily in her chest — and then it is gone, the man backed away from the counter, the sparkle that she noticed in his eye disappeared. 

“I’ll be getting to my room, then,” he says, taking another step away from the desk. “I hope to see you around, Miss Swan.” He flashes her a momentary smile before passing the desk, and she ignores her desire to turn towards him as he walks away from her, even as the bell for the elevator dings on its arrival. 

“I sure hope so,” she whispers finally, only allowing herself to turn in the direction he walked in when she hears the elevator doors closing. 

She does see him around, somehow more than she sees all the other guests at the hotel. She sees him two more times that same day, both on her lunch break and when she eats dinner with the family she has found here. Of all the places available to eat, he chooses the same one as her, not just once, but  _ twice  _ in one day. 

As she sits between Mary Margaret and Ruby at the table, trying not to stare across the room where he is sitting against the wall, a book perched on the table under his prosthetic hand which his other holds a mug, Emma tries to ignore the mathematical improbability of the two of them being in the same place twice in one day, in an area as large as not just the Hotel, but the whole area around it. 

She tries to ignore it again the next day as he’s sitting in the corner of her regular coffee shop, sitting in the same position as the night before when she shows up to get her morning coffee. 

And when he is sitting on a bench in the park when she chooses to go there instead of to lunch. 

(And then that same night in her dreams, but that’s not something she wants to admit to anyone, even herself.)

Three nights later, sitting at their favorite bar, Emma can’t stop her eyes from wandering to where he is sitting in the corner, his attention still on the book sitting in front of him. 

“Emma, come on,” Ruby says, nudging her shoulder with her own, and Emma turns her eyes back towards her friend. “What’s gotten into you? Every time I’ve seen you this week, you’ve been distracted.” 

She just shrugs, taking a sip of her beer. What would she even tell Ruby? That ever since this man fell through the elevator doors, she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about him — not to mention the handful of times she has seen him since he showed up? That she has never felt as connected to anyone as she feels connected to this man, who she hasn’t even had the nerve to talk to since she first saw him? She stopped believing long ago that she would ever be able to find the same happiness that she thought she found during her life with Neal — but how would she ever admit to anyone, even her closest friend, that just being in the same room as him has been making her hopeful again?

This, of course, is when she realizes her eyes have turned towards him again, and when Ruby swivels her chair around completely to follow her gaze, the man in question raises his eyes from the book held in front of him and finds Emma’s embarrassed gaze, the corner of his lips turning up in a smile. 

When Ruby turns back towards Emma, she is smiling, as well, though hers is much more malicious than Killian’s. 

“Oh, he’s a hottie!” she says, perhaps a little too loudly, and it does nothing to help the blush that has already started rising up her cheeks. “Do you know who he is?” 

Her eyes flit back towards the bar, her index finger slowly running around the rim of her glass. She knows she is useless against Ruby’s ability to find information, to pull her darkest secrets out with just a question and a flick of her eyebrow, so she does not even try to hide the answer to this one, though even this does not stop the sigh that escapes her lips. 

“His name is Killian. He just — he just got here a few days ago.” 

“Yeah, of course,” Ruby says, swiveling in her seat once more, not even trying to hide the obviousness of what she is doing. “I’ve seen him around a few times.” 

“I’ve been…” she starts, then drops her eyes down to the bar, pursing her lips. 

When she stays silent for a moment too long for Ruby’s liking, she begins to beat on Emma’s shoulder with her hand. “Come  _ on _ , Emma, spill!” 

“I’ve seen him far too much for it to be a coincidence,” she says finally, the words practically spilling from her lips, though when she does say it, it’s as if a weight has been lifted from her shoulders, from letting out what she has been keeping in for the past few days. 

Ruby’s eyes go wide, a smile spreading across her face. “What do you think it means, Em?” 

She leans closer to her friend, allowing her eyes to flit up to Killian for a moment, relieved to see that his attention is back on his book. “At first I thought he was following me,” she admits, releasing her glass to hold her head in her hands. “But then he started already being in places I spontaneously decided to go, and I knew — it definitely wasn’t that anymore.” 

Ruby’s eyes are wide when Emma finally turns towards her. “So you just keep running into this incredibly beautiful man and doing nothing about it?” 

“What am I supposed to do about it?” 

“Christ, Emma, have you even tried talking to him?” 

“Well, no, but —  _ how _ — “ she sputters, and Ruby reaches between them to cover Emma’s hand with her own. 

“Oh, honey,” she whispers, smiling at her friend. “How long has it been since you flirted with a man?” 

She presses her lips in a tight line as she tries not to think about the answer to this question. Sure, there have been a few flirtatious moments since she got to the Afterlife Hotel, but the last person she  _ really  _ flirted with was Neal, the man she fell in love with during her life — the man that killed her. 

And what is even the point of flirting in the afterlife, when she’s already missed her chance to meet her soulmate?

In place of responding, she just shakes her head. 

Ruby smiles, a soft, gentle thing, as Emma finishes her beer, Ruby flagging down the bartender for another. "I promise you, Em, it really isn't that difficult."

"No offense, Rubes, but that doesn't really make me feel any better, coming from you."

"I mean, I could always go over and flirt with him myself just to show you how it's done, if that would make you—"

Emma stops her before she can say anything else. "No, that's... that’s not necessary."

Ruby turns around once more, her eyes flitting to the handsome man in the corner. "Are you sure? Because it’s certainly a sacrifice I would be willing to make for my best friend."

"I'm definitely okay."

Ruby's shoulders visibly sag. "What a shame." When Emma has no response to this, Ruby turns back to her, taking a moment to look at her friend's face, though her attention is still on the man in the corner. A beat later, Ruby says, "You know what that means, though, right?"

When Emma finally pulls her eyes back to Ruby, the first thing she sees is the grin spreading across her face. "What?"

Ruby leans over and gently bumps her shoulder. "This means you need to go talk to him yourself."

Emma feels her cheeks redden upon understanding this. "You're sure there's no way for me to get out of this?" she asks, a shy smile forming on her face in hopes her best friend will let up.

"No chance. Either you go talk to that gorgeous specimen of a man, or I'll do it myself."

Emma takes a deep breath, then a quick gulp of her beer, before pushing herself off the stool and, beer in hand, walking across the room. 

With his attention still between the covers of the book sitting in front of him on the table, he does not notice her moving towards him until she slides into the booth across from him, the cheap pleather groaning beneath her movement. 

“Are you following me?” she asks, and for a moment he thinks she’s serious, until his eyes move from the pages in front of him to her smiling green eyes. 

“If I remember correctly, love, I was already enjoying a nice quiet night in this pub with my rum and my book when you and your friend showed up here.” 

“It’s not just here, though,” she says, not even meaning to lean towards him with her forearms on the table, but she doesn’t stop herself when she realizes this is what she does. “Have you noticed that?” 

“Aye,” he says, the corner of his lips ticking up in a momentary smile. “I have noticed that you and I always seem to be in the same place at the same time.” 

“And you haven’t even said anything,” she jokes, pressing her fingertips to her heart in mock indignation. 

Here, he leans forward, as well, the tips of his fingers brushing against her knuckles. “Either have you,” he whispers, pausing for just a moment before he leans back against the booth behind him, which groans under the shifting weight. “What finally got you to build up the nerve?” 

Emma tries her best to smile at him, but she feels the edges of her cheeks heat up as she realizes she is about to tell him the truth. “Well, my friend Ruby over there —” when she points, they both turn their attention towards her only to find that she is watching them intently from the bar. But, because she is never ashamed or embarrassed, she just smiles at them, waving her fingers in their direction as Emma continues. “—threatened to come over here and talk to you herself if I didn’t do it, and she… Well, she’s much more straightforward than I could ever be.” 

“And what? You were afraid that I would be unable to combat her charms?”

“Ruby and I have been friends here for almost fifty years, and I have yet to see a man who is able to combat her charms.” 

“Fifty years,” he says under his breath, then snaps his eyes up to meet hers as if he didn’t really mean to say it out loud. “Emma, if you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been down here?” 

Pressing her lips together, she takes a quick sip of her beer, avoiding his eyes. “Sixty years, almost exactly,” she says softly, and she fears that he did not even hear her — until his hand covers hers on the table, a movement which causes her to raise her eyes to meet his gaze. “The day you came here was sixty years to the day,” she continues, her thumb moving gently over Killian’s hand as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. 

(Because, she refuses to admit, it just might be. Because, she refuses to admit, sitting here with him, the soft feel of his fingers against hers, feels like all the pieces of her world slowly moving into place — which has to be, of course, an exaggeration.) 

“Sixty years is a long time.” 

“See, that’s the funny thing,” she admits, trying to avoid the fact that she is about to discuss her life with a man she’s had exactly one conversation with before, a conversation that she had to have with him as part of her job. “Because I was alive on earth for half of that, and the time I spent here feels like moments compared to everything I went through when I was alive. At least here, I found myself a family, which is more than I could ever say for the time I spent there.” 

They sit in silence for a few moments, though neither of them feel awkward through it. Instead, Emma feels comforted by the warmth of Killian’s skin against hers, by the soft smile that he sends in her direction the few times her eyes dare to meet his. 

“Will you dance with me, Emma?” Killian asks after the moments tick into minutes. Everything in her screams to say no — to stay in her own little secluded corner instead of becoming the object of people’s attention. But still, through all the alarms blaring in her mind, none of that stops her from nodding her head to him, smiling softly as he leads them out of their booth and over to the dancefloor. 

When he welcomes her into his arms, it’s almost as if the stress from her day — from the past  _ sixty years’ _ worth of days — melts off of her. With the weight of his prosthetic on her back, his fingers curled gently around her own over his heart, she is able to focus on nothing but the warmth of his skin under her fingers — a feeling that she can swear is the single thing that was missing from her life. 

Silence fills the space between them, Emma’s eyes somehow never leaving his even though she can swear that she’s never been more embarrassed in her life, but she can tell his face is full of questions. She has never been more sure in her life that she has wanted to kiss someone, and something in his eyes makes her believe the same is true for him. 

She watches as his eyes flit down to her lips, as his tongue slowly moves along his bottom lip, but the moment he begins to lean further into her space, he stops himself and backs away instead. 

“Tell me something about yourself, Swan.” 

“You sure know how to change the mood,” she jokes with a smile, turning her gaze up to meet his, but when she sees the darkness that has overtaken his eyes, the deep shade of midnight blue they have become, she thinks she understands. 

“Either we need to talk about something, or the occupants of this bar are going to get a show that they were not expecting when they showed up.” His words come out low, growled through clenched teeth as his hand on her back pulls her lips closer to his. 

“I’m sure no one would complain about the show, nothing exciting happens around here, anyway.” 

“The issue with that plan is that I was raised to be far too much of a gentleman to simply give in to desires such as these with a woman I am as interested in as you before properly courting you.” 

She raises an eyebrow at him, the smirk still covering her face. “A  _ gentleman _ , eh?” 

“I can assure you, Swan,” he says with a smirk of his own, then leans forward so his lips are practically brushing the shell of her ear. “I am  _ always  _ a gentleman.” When he leans back, though, the smirk on his face has disappeared, as has the glint she swore she saw in his piercing blue eyes just moments before. “Now, tell me something about yourself that you would tell a man interested in courting you.”

“Can I ask you a question then?” 

“Fact first, then you can ask whatever you want.” 

“What if I want you to ask me a question instead of just spewing facts for you?” 

“Is that your question?” 

She hits him gently on the shoulder with the hand placed there. “Of course not.” 

“If that’s the game you would like to play, then we can do it that way.” 

“Ask away, then.” 

“Where and when were you born?” 

She feels her heart squeeze in her chest. It’s an innocent enough question, of course, and there is no way for him to know just how much it hurts her to think of that time. Of  _ any  _ time. “Some time around the end of October, 1929.” She swallows, taking a small breath. “And I don’t know exactly where or when I was born. I was raised in an orphanage in Boston, Massachusetts, dropped off just a few days old.” 

She flicks her eyes up to his, which is a mistake, because she does not need her gaze to linger there long to notice the sadness that has flooded his eyes. “I’m sorry, that must have been terrible.” 

The few times she has needed to speak of her childhood, she has shrugged it off, offered some sort of snarky comment about how it  _ wasn’t great _ or  _ could have been better _ , but when she goes to do the same to Killian, the words simply don’t come. 

So she shrugs. A beat passes between them, and all she can do to fill the silence is ask her own question. 

“What happened to your hand?” 

He does not say anything at first, does not  _ do _ anything — even his movements cease, stilling them for a few moments before he finally starts speaking.

“My brother and I were in the Navy. Or, well, I suppose he still is.” When she looks up at him, his eyes are set on the ceiling above them, his tongue quickly darting out of his mouth to wet his lips before he continues. “A few years ago, I was involved with an accident that happened on the base I was working on, when one of the engines malfunctioned. And, as an engineer, I was put in charge of the team that was to bring the ship to dock and fix the malfunction, but the issue wasn’t in the engine, but in one of the pieces that connect the engine to the propellers. But, as I was working with removing the propeller, the problem decided to not be a problem anymore, and the engine came back to life before I could remove my hand from where I was trying to fix it.” 

He pauses, taking a deep, slow breath that he releases quickly before finally turning his gaze back to hers, though she has been watching his face the whole time. “Thankfully the Navy paid for all of it, for the replacement and the physical therapy and everything, so the technology of it is actually phenomenal, though that doesn’t make me miss the one I lost any less.” 

“Of course,” she whispers, and the corner of his lips ticks up in the beginnings of a smile. A moment of silence passes between them before Emma decides to change the subject: “Your turn.” 

With his dark eyebrows set low on his forehead, she can tell that he is working to think of another question. “What made you stay here for sixty years?” 

“Fear,” she says quickly, then shakes her head. “At first. I never really had a family in Boston, never had anyone that would have been worth waiting for, but I was afraid of what I would find if I did decide to move on. And then Mary Margaret, the woman that was working at the desk when I got here, and her husband David, became my adopted parents, of sorts. The first family I ever had. And since I found them here, I realized that maybe this was exactly where I was supposed to be.” 

This answer is much happier than the last, shown both by the smile that now covers Killian’s face, and the one she finds growing across her own. 

“It might sound a little stupid, of course, but —”

“I don’t think it sounds stupid at all, Emma,” he says, his voice soft. “I think it makes perfect sense.” 

There is something else there, something in his eyes that goes far beyond the words he just said, and though Emma sees it,  _ recognizes it _ , she chooses to ignore it. They’re in no hurry, they have all the time in the world, she realizes, laughing as she asks him why he always brings a book with him, and the tips of his ears turn red with embarrassment when he tells her that he always wished he had more time to read, and when he got here and realized that time is all he has now, he knew that was going to be how he passed the hours. They pass a few more questions back and forth, sometimes letting minutes of silence pass between them before one of them takes their turn. Before too long, most of the bar has left them behind, and with a few stragglers spread across the long marble bar, they are some of the last patrons for the night.

“Can I ask you about him?” he asks finally, his voice soft, almost as if he was afraid to ruin the feel of the room around them. When she turns his attention up to him, hoping to search his face to make sure he is asking what she thinks he is, his eyes are turned down to the floor between them.

“He wasn’t…” she starts, laughing to herself for a moment before she continues. “There’s not much to say. He wasn’t who he said he was, and he wasn’t… he wasn’t the right one, alright?” 

“You fell for the wrong one,” he says, and it’s not a question. When he finally raises his eyes to meet hers, she pushes down the idea that the blue of them is somehow filled with understanding. 

“Yeah,” she breathes. 

“Me too.” 

She doesn’t expect it, was not going to ask about his soulmate, and she has no idea how to respond. 

“She lied to me about so many things, didn’t tell me that she was already married, and then she — Christ, she… she shot me. She  _ killed  _ me. Everything went dark for just a second, and then I was — I was in the lobby here, with an absolutely perfect angel standing in front of me.”

“Oh, come on,” she jokes, hitting his shoulder lightly before leading her hand back to meet his. But instead of taking her hand again, he lets go of her to reach down and pull the sleeve of his shirt up to his elbow. 

All of the air in the room leaves, including what was in her lungs. It’s the last thing she expected to see, had never even heard of soulmates who met each other in the afterlife, something she had led herself to believe was impossible. But there, right before her, is all the evidence she needs to know that not all hope had been lost for her yet. Right there, tattooed on the wrist Killian still has, is  _ her  _ name,  _ her  _ “Swan.”

“How long have you known?” she asks, but because she still has not regained the ability to breathe, she finds herself reaching to splay her hands against his chest, stopping herself from collapsing. It’s been years since she last swam, but she vaguely remembers the feeling of drowning, of water filling up her mouth, her throat. If she’s remembering it correctly, that is exactly what she feels right now.

“I had an idea when you first introduced yourself to me, but when I kept seeing you around, I was really hoping that it would be you.” Everything drops out from around her. She's not drowning anymore. She's floating, only anchored to the ground by the warmth of his hard chest under her hands.

"Why haven't you said something? Why did you even allow me to go through this whole night just talking to you?" 

He sighs, an embarrassed smile growing across his face. "I needed to know. I needed to be sure that you were interested in me beyond my name on your wrist, because that's how Mi — that was all she cared about." His words are careful, proof that he has been thinking about this, worrying about this — but it is the sincerity awash in his pale blue eyes that really gets to her. "I needed you to like me for me, needed you to like  _ Killian Jones _ before you knew that maybe I was the one with your name on my wrist, the one who went through my entire life on Earth wondering who 'Swan' was, wondering when I would find her. The one I thought about when I realized what I had with Milah was fake." 

"Killian," she breathes, not even meaning to sway closer into his space, but she does anyway — until she realizes something “That means…” she trails off, pulling the sleeve of her own sweater up to reveal the scribbles that she stopped really caring about when she was 22, that she wondered why the world was cruel enough to give her without ever giving her the chance to care about them, up until those very last minutes. “That means these scribbles are yours.” 

“Aye,” he whispers, leaning forward to press his forehead against hers, his arms wrapping around her waist. “Those are, in fact, my  _ scribbles _ ,” he jokes, smiling at her. 

And then the feel of his arms around her is nothing compared to the perfect feel of their lips meeting, to the comfort that she finds when he slides his tongue against hers. 

Nothing compared to the warmth of his body against hers when the elevator finally deposits them outside their neighboring doors and he pulls her inside his and pushes her against the door, as he presses soft kisses along as much of her skin as he can reach, his lips following his hands as he starts to memorize every inch of her. Nothing compared to the way he worships her body and soul together the way that only a true soulmate can before she collapses beside him and curls up under the covers of his bed. 

However, when she wakes beside him the next morning, and for every subsequent morning after that, his hand heavy on her hip and his breath hot on her back, she can swear that she has never felt more complete in her life — or her death — then she does here, spending the rest of eternity beside her soulmate. 


End file.
